A Failure For The Contactless Olympics Holds A Warning For Mobile Money

Sunday night, and tens of thousands of Olympic football fans were packed into Wembley Stadium. And they couldn't pay with their credit or debit card for any refreshments due to issues with the local IT system. Thanks to Visa's sponsorship of the games (as illustrated by signage with the delightfully ironic "proud to only accept Visa") there was no fallback to another card provider or merchant system. And the majority of cash machines normally present at Wembley had been removed before the Games started, because they were powered by Link, and not Visa.

Have a guess how many cash machines are inside Olympic venues this year, to help service the expected 11 million spectators.

Eight.

When the only electronic payment system was unavailable, there was just one fallback. Cold, hard, cash. And there wasn't enough to go around.

This isn't a diatribe against Wembley, Visa, or the issues that exclusive providers are causing around London 2012. If you step back from the details of this case, it's a warning about trusting something as vital to human nature (currency) to digital systems that can break.

Faults happen in complicated systems. While many think the key to avoiding this is covering every possible error, smart design is making sure that when the system fails, there is a backup. The credit and debit card systems many of us rely on have a robustness that has built up over time both through experience and the efforts to keep ahead of the competition.

As more effort and investment is made to find viable payment solutions for the digital age, the question of these safety nets springs to my mind. The Olympics, in their rush to sell exclusivity, has forgotten that lesson. The reliance on Visa has created a potential point of critical failure.

But it's a lesson that the mobile money industry needs to be aware of as well.

Take the smartphone wallet. Google Wallet is already being trialled in the US, Microsoft has demoed the Windows Phone Wallet System, Barclays and Visa are working on PayWave in the UK (and have been using the Olympics to trial the system, with every athlete being handed a suitably modified Samsung Galaxy S3 pre-loaded with credit to spend). To go for a trivial example, if you were to rely on these wallets, what will happen when your mobile phone runs out of charge?

I've yet to see a mobile money solution that I would trust 100% to always deliver for me in the way I trust the physical cards in my wallet. I like redundancy in my life - if something goes wrong then it should be simple matter to switch to an alternative (and work out what went wrong in a timely manner). In the rush to gain first mover advantage, I worry that any system that I am going to rely on is a fragile daisy chain of services that are easily broken.